And Yet I Did Okay

Richard Quinn  |  Jul 13, 2023

IF YOU WANT ADVICE on investing, don’t ask me. My investment knowledge is, shall we say, limited.

I don’t pay much attention to expense ratios, individual stocks, international markets, the VIX, interest rates or much else. I know nothing about evaluating stocks or the overall market, though I have learned the hard way that rising interest rates aren’t friendly to utility stocks.

In other words, I’m more like your typical saver who’s playing at investing.

The way I look at it, the most important thing is to keep your net worth growing and you can do that by saving regularly, even if you never earn a penny on those savings. Let’s say you saved 50 cents from your pocket change every day for 40 years. You’d accumulate $7,300, even if you just left the money in a piggy bank. Oh right, inflation.

I invest in municipal bond funds—simply because I like the idea of the tax-free income. So little is actually free these days. Would higher-yielding taxable bonds have been a better deal, given my tax bracket? I failed to determine that. Still, that tax-free income provides a nice inflation hedge.

I’ve saved and invested since I was age 18. I signed up to buy savings bonds through payroll deduction as soon as I started my first job. When I became eligible, I enrolled in my employer’s stock purchase plan, which allowed me to buy shares at a 5% discount. Along the way, I dabbled modestly in a few mutual funds. In 1982, when the company introduced a 401(k), I signed up and didn’t stop until I retired in 2010. In every case, I reinvested all earnings—and still do.